Why not become a lifetime supporting member of the site with a one-time donation of any amount? Your donation entitles you to a ton of additional benefits, including access to exclusive discounts and downloads, the ability to enter monthly free software drawings, and a single non-expiring license key for all of our programs.

You must sign up here before you can post and access some areas of the site. Registration is totally free and confidential.

Any other members, or even one of the submitting members, could choose to accept the current total of "bids" and make the software release within X amount of time. If it's done in time, all bids go to the developer. If not, they are either returned or left in the project for the next developer.

That's a great idea! I would amend that to include a way to give a partial credit amount if the timeframe is missed, since real work would still have been invested and "real life" can get in the way of one's plans. Maybe it could only "pay" partial credits, if needed, when the project is fully completed (with the definition of "completed" meeting some accepted standard either per project or defined overall).

Definitely! I wonder if it's describing the program itself or just the error?

What's really "fun" about Media Player is that the dialog just repeats the status message. The "details" button also has always repeated the error message whenever I've seen one, without anything else added.

Hey, brotherS, are you still running into that undimming bug? I just reread your note and saw that you're having to wait for the timeout to do your testing. I'm attaching a freeware program that starts the Windows currently-active saver as if the timeout happened.

For a fancier one the developer, Stardust Software, makes a tray-based saver control with more options, but the one I'm posting just runs, starts the saver, and quits again. I've got it on a hotkey, myself, as an alternative to locking the sytem when I step away (by hitting Win-L). This one's a whole 25k, so I didn't even bother to zip it.

Thanks -- it's really nuts how deeply buried something like that is, considering the difference it makes. Have you seen the new Office that's coming out? They've really done a major redesign of the UI so that stuff you need related to what you're doing is easy to find, and stuff that's not related is not in your way. Here's hoping they'll do the same with Windows...[attachimg=1]

I agree with zridling's comments regarding the fact that a major difference between these search programs is the interface. However, I respectfully disagree with the issue of continually spinning HD's.

With X1, the user determines exactly when, if ever, the index should be updated, either on a scheduled or manually selected time. The initial indexing takes a while but incremental indexes are quite fast.

By the way, a lot of people know about the Indexer that comes with XP (Pro? and maybe even 2k) or later. What most don't seem to know is that it can really be tweaked so that it stays out of your way. Its default settings have it getting in the way of doing anything else on the machine while it's updating. This is made worse by the "tweak" settings being not only left off of the menus, but they're only on one of two otherwise identical (or nearly identical) context menus.

Just a quick once-over in case it helps some of the folks here: once you go through the Administrative Tools (or Run dialog) to get to the Microsoft Management Console and then the Indexing Service, you right-click the resulting pane on the right, winding your way to this menu:[attachimg=1]

Then you work your way through a couple of dialogs and you're (finally!) able to customize the performance settings.

[attachimg=2]

Each of the two settings have 3 steps, and with Indexing set to "lazy", and Querying set to "High load", the system then waits for you to have stopped any activity for a period of time before it'll start indexing anything not already in the Catalog. As soon as you start to use the mouse or keyboard, *poof*, it stops and waits for you again. Makes a huge difference.

You may even get good performance with the Indexing at the middle position, but you're guaranteed for it to be getting in your way working regardless of your own activities if you set it on Instant, and you can count on a performance hit even with a peppy machine.

Let me know if there's anything I can do from this end to help. I'll load those scissors into GIMP in the next couple days (finishing up finals at school) and see what I can do. I should be able to poke a "hole" for those handles.

Is there a way to paste into a new image with Captor that I'm overlooking?

one thing i miss is ability to 1) paste clipboard image as a new resizable/movable object onto an existing screenshot.2) merge two screenshots.

so i'm going to add these function - i think it will make it easier to combine screenshots.

any related suggestions?

Maybe I'm not understanding the concept. When I open Captor, it displays any previous pics as thumbnails on the left, and one is loaded. If I paste, the clipboard is added to the current (old) image, or if I delete that and paste there's a flicker but then a blank image is created. I couldn't find a way to paste as new (rather than using Captor itself to create the image from scratch).

Also, any dialog that has a non-rectangular window isn't captured as such. (A good example that almost everyone has handy is Media Player.)[attachimg=1]

One program that does that well (but otherwise isn't as cool as Captor ) is the freeware WinSnap. Maybe since both of you are coding the respective programs for fun (and out of necessity) you could combine your efforts? That's not to presume that you want to, of course, but it's a thought. There's a lot of overlap in their feature set.

Here's WinSnap's version of the same shot:[attachimg=3]

BTW, in the FWIW category, the "scissors" pic bundled with Captor needs its finger holes "cut out" -- they're opaque. [attachimg=2]I can try to do it myself and email if you like, but I haven't tried it yet.

I'm not sure how cleanly it shuts down file connections with applications

True. That's a consideration with any of the techniques above -- they're all nonstandard methods, but one bonus of Unlocker is that it shows the name of the program that has the file lock (without listing a bunch of other stuff). Then you still have the option to close that program normally.

A lot of big-name tools are designed to require Windows 2000 or better, but for those holdouts still running the Win95/98 series there's an older search tool that was put out by AltaVista when they were still owned by DEC. I used it for several years around the turn of the century (sounds ancient, doesn't it?) and I found it to be a really good performer that doesn't need to grind away at the hard drive endlessly. I just updated its database about once a week.

There's a blog that discusses it in more detail here, and it also links to the software. The only thing they don't have is a screenshot, but if you're curious there's one in a PC Pro review. (I didn't want to hotlink their pic directly.)

Ha! That's great. I especially love the first line in the second screenshot on the program's page: "The master clocks of this program have intentional taste of useless." I'll have to try that in my next bug report to a freeware or shareware coder!

Have you guys seen the Lost In Translation website? It feeds your text through multiple translation engines to see if you can still make sense of it on the other end. There're some examples posted there, but here's one I tried:

Quote

Original English Text:Easy come, easy go.

Translated to Japanese:?????????????(these characters aren't recognized by the forum software, but they were there, honest!)

Hey, Skrommel, I think I've got an easier approach. It's a bit of a kludge, but the end result is the same as described in previous posts. Would it be possible to take the DelEmpty program and add a function to move the files from any folders containing single files to their parent dir and then delete the original (now empty) dir? That should be a heckuva lot smaller project (hopefully) than the original idea.